Unless . . .
Stepping across to the opposite wall, he ran his hand across its surface, top to bottom. His fingertips brushed four more cavities. Same size as the ones on the other side, and at pretty much the same height.
Like an explosion of light, a memory burst into his head. Something he’d seen six, seven years ago. In the Valley of the Kings. His Antiquities Service friend Ginger had taken him and Ali on a tour of some of the closed tombs. On the way through the centre of the valley, Ginger had stopped to point out the vertical shaft of Tomb KV56, recently cleared by a team of British archaeologists. On either side of the shaft, shallow depressions had been cut into the rock walls.
‘Footholds,’ Ginger had explained when Khalifa pointed them out. ‘The ancient workers would stand astride the shaft and use them to climb down and up. Like spiders in a pipe. Easy if you’ve got long legs.’
Khalifa didn’t have long legs. What he lacked in physique, however, he more than made up for in brute desperation. Jamming the Helwan deeper into the waistband of his trousers, he shuffled himself astride until his feet were touching the passage walls. It was a stretch, but he could just about do it – had the tunnel been even a few centimetres wider it would have been too much for him. He settled the tip of his left shoe into the lowest of the left-hand slots. Then, pressing his fingers against the rock for balance, he murmured a quick prayer and hopped his right foot up. He missed the corresponding cavity and stumbled forward. He tried again, and again, finally made it on the fourth attempt. For a moment he stood there, his legs bridging the tunnel, the muscles of his groin screaming in protest at the unaccustomed posture. Then he lurched his left foot up to the next depression. He hit it, got his right foot up, lost his balance, fell.
‘
Yalla!
’ he hissed, knowing this was realistically his only chance of getting out of the tunnel and if he didn’t take it he was dead. ‘
Yalla!
’
On the next go he got up slightly higher before falling. The go after that he actually managed to get his arms and head into the hole before his legs gave and he crashed back down. Refusing to accept defeat, he launched yet another attempt, ignoring the agony in his thighs, the scouring stench of garlic, the trickle of blood running down his temple from where he’d cut it in his last fall – channelling his entire being into the task of getting up those four depressions and into the shaft.
And this time he made it. He reached the uppermost of the footholds, found a slot cut into the shaft wall, heaved himself up. He found another slot, and then another, heaved and scrambled. And then he was out of the tunnel and into the flue.
‘
Hamdulillah, hamdulillah, hamdulillah
.’
He gave himself a moment, legs braced against the flue wall. Then he started to climb. Deep foot- and hand-holds had been cut into the wall at regular intervals and he was able to ascend without too much trouble, moving from one slot to the next as though mounting a ladder. Always at the back of his mind was the fear that the shaft would be another dead end. He didn’t dwell on it, just kept going through the blackness, taking it slowly, testing each hold before transferring his weight to it, aware that a fall would mean broken limbs and certain death. Once a bat fluttered down from above and straight into his face. Once he found himself pushing through something soft and gauzy which he assumed must be a spider’s web. Otherwise the shaft was mercifully clear and, after a climb of some twenty metres, the walls suddenly fell away and he was clambering out of the hole into some sort of open space. Crawling forward a metre, he slumped face down on to a flat, dusty floor, his relief at escaping from the passage tempered by the knowledge that he was still very much a prisoner of the Labyrinth.
J
ERUSALEM
Ben-Roi tried. He really did. She meant so much to him, she’d made such an effort to make the evening special. To give the two of them another chance. The three of them.
All his thoughts, however, were on Khalifa. Sarah would be talking, telling him something about the baby, something intimate, and his gaze would keep wandering down to the phone display, willing it to light up. She’d disappear into the kitchen to fetch something and the moment her back was turned the mobile would be in his hand and he’d be leaving Khalifa yet another message, pleading with him to get in touch.
He tried. He really did. But his attention was elsewhere. And Sarah could see it. See it as clearly as if it was flashing from a neon hoarding above his head. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t make a scene about it. Around 9.30, however, as she was clearing away the remains of the almond cake she’d baked for dessert – yet another of Ben-Roi’s favourite dishes – she called time on the evening.
‘Go home, Arieh,’ she said. ‘Or go to the office, go for a walk – go somewhere you can concentrate on what you need to concentrate on.’
‘But it’s still early. I thought we could . . .’
‘You’re not here, Arieh. If your friend’s in trouble, I think you should be somewhere you can focus on that. Not sitting around making small talk with me.’
He tried to remonstrate, to persuade her to at least let him stay long enough to help wash up, but she was adamant. Not angry adamant, or bitter adamant. Sad adamant. The saddest he’d ever seen her. The chance had gone. The last chance, something told him.
He pocketed his phone and accompanied her to the front door. As she showed him out he tried to kiss her. She angled her face, offering him her cheek.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
‘I had a good time.’
She didn’t match that. She allowed him to kiss the curve of her stomach, voiced a hope that Khalifa was OK. Then, stepping back, she closed the door.
‘I’ll call,’ he shouted.
No response. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he caught a muffled sob.
T
HE
L
ABYRINTH
‘
Salaam!
’
Khalifa’s voice echoed. By the sound of it, he was in some sort of large cave or chamber. Like the ones he’d passed through on his way down the mine’s main gallery. He dipped his head, trying to recall anything similar in Samuel Pinsker’s diagrams. He couldn’t. He shuffled a few paces forward, arms stretched in front of him like a blind man, then shuffled back. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out his handkerchief and spread it on the floor beside the rim of the shaft. When he’d climbed up from below, he’d been facing towards the gallery and he positioned the handkerchief against the shaft edge pointing in that direction. In the tunnel, with two straight walls to either side, it had been easy to keep track of where he was in relation to the mine’s primary axis. Here, with no immediate features to guide him, it was going to be a lot harder. The hand kerchief would at least provide a point of reference.
He patted the material down, making sure there could be no confusion as to which side of the shaft it was on. Then, straightening, he started forward again, swirling his hands through the darkness, following the line of the passage beneath, back in the direction of the main gallery.
After twenty paces he hit rock.
He felt up and down, started shuffling to the right. The walls were solid. He kept going, inching his way around the chamber, cave, whatever the hell it was. So intense was the black that within a matter of steps he’d lost all sense of where he was relative to the shaft opening. He hit a pile of rocks, picked up one of the smaller ones, threw it into the void above. A dull clack echoed overhead. High overhead, although how high he couldn’t tell. He launched another rock across the chamber. Another clack. Ten metres away? Twenty? It was impossible to judge. He threw four more stones to give himself some vague sense of the dimensions of the space – it was big, that was about as precise as he could get – and continued his progress round the walls. He encountered two large earthenware pots – very large, the height of his waist. A little further on his feet crunched something that on closer investigation turned out to be bones of some small animal.
He found no doorways or openings, no exit from the place, and he was just starting to panic, to think that maybe the tunnel, the shaft and the chamber were all part of the same dead end, when he bumped into something propped against the wall.
A ladder.
He ran his hands over it. Vertical stiles, rungs, leather bindings. Solid, by the feel of it. He tested the bottom rung. Firm. He started to climb, carefully, one step at a time. Six rungs up he discovered a large opening in the wall. Just like the ones he’d seen back in the mine’s entrance chamber.
‘
Salaam!
’
Echoes. It was another tunnel. A way out. But which way was the way out going? And was it the only one, or were there other options?
He clambered back down. Continuing to the right, he shuffled on round the chamber walls, eventually reaching the rock pile again. There were no openings at ground level. No corners either, which told him the space was roughly circular. He felt his way back to the ladder. Dropping to his knees, he crawled across the chamber, aiming as straight as he could, sweeping his hands back and forth, searching for the top of the shaft. After a couple of minutes he hit rock. Dammit! Missed! He stood, felt his way round to the ladder again, knelt, crawled, angling slightly to the left of his previous line. This time he found the opening. The handkerchief was on its far side. Which told him that the tunnel was pointing roughly away from the main gallery. He repeated the process to make sure he’d got his bearings correct, then returned to the ladder. Removing a shoe, he placed it against the wall to mark the ladder’s position. Then, hobbling in one socked foot, he started to shunt the ladder around the chamber, climbing and descending, searching for any other openings. There were none. Or at least none that he could discover. He went all the way round, reached the shoe again, put it back on. The decision had been made for him. He climbed the ladder, clambered into the tunnel and started along it, flailing his hand in front of him, keeping his head low to avoid banging it on the ceiling.
Twenty metres in – maybe more, maybe less; he was caught in a netherworld where everything was hopelessly vague and indeterminate – the ceiling lifted and he was able to stand upright. A similar distance beyond that the tunnel branched. The left fork sloped down, the right one up. He chose left, making sure he memorized the split in case he needed to retrace his steps. He descended a way, hit a set of stairs that took him up again, came to a sort of crossroads with other tunnels leading off to left and right. Again, he went left, calculating that he must now be moving roughly parallel to the main gallery, although well above it. This new tunnel ran straight before suddenly sloping steeply down and curling back on itself so that by his calculations – and with every step he was becoming less and less sure of those calculations – he was now heading further into the mine rather than back towards the entrance. A passage opened to his right. He took it, came into what felt like a room full of pillars. Doorways in each of its walls. More passages, more decisions, more complexity, more confusion.
‘Oh God help me,’ he choked. ‘Please God help me. Please. Please.’
And all the while the blackness in his eyes, and the silence in his ears, and the slow, inexorable embrace of the Labyrinth as it coiled itself around him.
J
ERUSALEM
Ben-Roi went home, tried to work out what to do. About Khalifa
and
Sarah.
He’d call her tomorrow, take round flowers, plead for another chance.
Yet
another chance. Something told him it wasn’t going to happen. That he’d blown it once and for all. Sure, he had an excuse for being so distracted. But then he always had excuses. There was always something, some reason why he couldn’t give completely of himself. If it wasn’t Khalifa it would just be some other crisis. Such was the nature of being a front-line cop. And short of stepping back from the front line and getting a desk job somewhere, or resigning from the force altogether, there was no gesture he could make that was going to resolve the impasse. She needed more from him, deserved more, and he couldn’t give it. Stalemate.
He allowed himself a few moments of regretful introspection. Then, accepting that there was nothing he could do about it tonight, he pushed Sarah and the baby out of his head and focused on his immediate priority – Khalifa.
Something had happened to his friend. Something bad. He was sure of it. There was no other explanation for his silence. And he, Ben-Roi, was responsible. It was he who’d got the Egyptian involved in the case. It was on his conscience.
Pacing around his apartment, he put in yet another call to the satellite phone, left yet another message. He called Khalifa’s regular cell phone as well, just on the off-chance. And then he booted his laptop and sent him an e-mail too. Just to cover all the bases.
What else? He didn’t have the Egyptian’s home number – they’d always communicated by mobile or e-mail. Even if he
did
have it, he wasn’t sure how much use it would have been. He hardly spoke any Arabic, and although it was possible there was someone in the family who spoke English, what was he going to say to them?
Sorry to trouble you, I just wanted to make sure your husband/father isn’t dead?
They already had enough grief to contend with. He didn’t want to be adding to their woes. He could track down the number, would call if and when he’d exhausted every other avenue. For the moment, he didn’t want to be upsetting them.
He thought about contacting Barren, but dismissed the idea out of hand. They were hardly going to help him find someone who’d gone to investigate a mine of whose existence they denied all knowledge.
Instead he belled Danny Perlmann, a friend of his who worked in Inter-Force Liaison over at National Police Headquarters on Mount Scopus. A fluent Arabic-speaker, Perlmann owed him a favour – several favours actually – and tonight Ben-Roi called them in. Perlmann grouched and grumbled, asked if it couldn’t wait till tomorrow, but Ben-Roi pressed him, and in the end he agreed to contact his contacts in the Egyptian Police, get some names and numbers in Luxor, see what he could find out.